Category: Pluto

New Horizons arrives at Cape Canaveral. Image credit: JHU APL. Click to enlarge.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft arrived at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Fla. , for fi nal preparations and testing for the probe’s decade-long journey. It will be the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and its moon, Charon.

New Horizons arrived Saturday at KSC’s Shuttle Landing Facility aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane. The spacecraft is in a clean room at KSC. It is scheduled to launch on a Lockheed Martin Atlas V rocket in January 2006. New Horizons recently completed four months of space-environment tests at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt , Md. , and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel , Md. , where it was designed and built.

Carrying seven scientific instruments the compact, nearly 1,000 pound probe will fly by Pluto and Charon as early as summer 2015. Its mission is to characterize the global geology and geomorphology of the bodies, map their surface compositions, record temperatures and examine Pluto’s complex atmosphere. Flybys of ancient rocky objects farther out in the solar system may be undertaken during an extended mission.

In October, New Horizons will undergo a series of functional tests, readiness checks, and an “end-to-end” test with the tracking facilities of NASA’s Deep Space Network. In November, hydrazine fuel for attitude control and course correction maneuvers will be loaded and the spacecraft will undergo a final spin-balance test.

At the Atlas Space Operations Center on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, processing has begun on the Atlas V. Stacking of the vehicle will begin in early October and completed in late October or early November. In November, a launch countdown rehearsal will be performed. In December, the flight-ready spacecraft will be transported to Launch Complex 41 for hoisting a top the Atlas V.

Following final launch approval, liftoff is scheduled for Jan. 11, 2006 , during a two-hour launch window that opens at 2:07 p.m. EST. Launch windows are also available daily from Jan. 12 through Feb. 14, 2006 .

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program of medium-class planetary missions. APL will operate the spacecraft for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) leads the New Horizons science and mission team. SwRI directed development of the mission’s seven science instruments.

The National Research Council ranked the first reconnaissance of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt at the top of its priority list for planetary missions to be launched in this decade. A close-up look at these mysterious worlds will provide new information about the origin and evolution of our solar system.

For information on the mission, visit http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.

Original Source: JHU APL News Release

Artist illustration of SMART-1. Image credit: ESA. Click to enlarge.

An artist’s conception of Pluto and its moon Charon. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge
On a clear summer night, the stars aligned for MIT researchers watching and waiting for one small light in the heavens to be extinguished, just briefly.

Thanks to a feat of both astronomical and terrestrial alignment, a group of scientists from MIT and Williams College succeeded in observing distant Pluto’s tiny moon, Charon, hide a star. Such an event had been seen only once before, by a single telescope 25 years ago, and then not nearly as well.

The MIT-Williams consortium spotted it with four telescopes in Chile on the night of July 10-11.

The team expects to use data from this observation to assess whether Charon has an atmosphere, to measure its radius and to determine how round it is.

The data and results from the observation will be presented at the 2005 meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences meeting to be held in Cambridge, England, in September.

MIT team leader James L. Elliot headed the group at the Clay Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

“We have been waiting many years for this opportunity. Watching Charon approach the star and then snuff it out was spectacular,” said Elliot, a professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science and the Department of Physics at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.

Jay M. Pasachoff, team leader from Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., and a professor in that school’s Department of Astronomy, said, “It’s amazing that people in our group could get in the right place at the right time to line up a tiny body 4 billion miles away. It’s quite a reward for so many people who worked so hard to arrange and integrate the equipment and to get the observations.”

With the Clay Telescope’s 6.5-meter mirror (more than 21 feet across, the size of a large room) the researchers were able to observe changes throughout the event, which lasted less than a minute. While their electronic cameras sensitively recorded data, the light of the faint star was seen to dim and then, some seconds later, brighten. This kind of disappearance of a celestial body behind a closer, apparently larger one is known as an occultation.

Studying how the light dimmed and brightened will let the MIT-Williams consortium look for signs that Charon has an atmosphere. It has very little mass and thus little gravity to hold in an atmosphere, but it is so cold (being some 40 times farther from the sun than the Earth) that some gases could be held in place by the small amount of Charon’s gravity.

Other telescopes around Chile used by the MIT-Williams consortium included the 8-meter (more than 26 feet across) Gemini South on Cerro Pachon, the 2.5-meter (more than 8 feet across) DuPont Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory and the 0.8-meter (almost 3 feet across) telescope at the Cerro Armazones Observatory of Chile’s Catholic University of the North near Cerro Paranal.

The team had searched for a distribution of telescopes along a north-south line in Chile since the predictions of the starlight shadow of Charon were uncertain by several hundred kilometers. Since the star that was hidden is so far away, it casts a shadow of Charon that is the same size as Charon itself, about 1,200 kilometers in diameter. To see the event, the distant star, Charon and the telescopes in Chile had to be perfectly aligned. All of these telescopes had clear views of the event.

Other MIT affiliates involved in the observation were MIT graduate students Elisabeth Adams, Michael Person and Susan Kern and postdoctoral associate Amanda Gulbis.

The images from three telescopes in Chile, including the Clay Telescope, and one in Brazil, were taken with new electronic cameras and computer control obtained by MIT and Williams with an equipment grant from NASA. The expeditions were sponsored by NASA’s Planetary Astronomy Program.

A video showing the star dimming as Charon passes in front of it and then brightening again is posted on the Web at http://occult.mit.edu/research/occultations/Charon/C313.2/C313OccMovie.html.

Teams from the Observatory of Paris at Meudon and from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., also observed the occultation.

Original Source: MIT News Release

Artist illustration of New Horizons with Pluto and Charon. Image credit: JHUAPL/SwRI. Click to enlarge.
The first spacecraft designed to study Pluto, the last planet in our solar system, arrived at NASA?s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Md., today for a series of pre-launch checkouts.

“We are extremely proud to have the NASA’s New Horizons mission make Goddard the first stop in its journey to the last planet,” said Dr. Ed Weiler, GSFC Center Director. “The New Horizons mission to Pluto is an historic journey of exploration to unlock secrets from a mysterious planet so distant that the Sun is just a bright star in the sky.”

The spacecraft will be at Goddard for the next three months where team members will check New Horizons? balance and alignment in a series of spin tests; put it before wall-sized speakers that simulate the noisy vibrations of launch; and seal it for several weeks in a four-story thermal-vacuum chamber that duplicates the extreme cold and airless conditions of space. After departing Goddard in the Fall, the spacecraft will make its way to the Kennedy Space Center, Fla. for final launch preparations.

New Horizons is the first mission to Pluto and its moon, Charon. As part of an extended mission, the spacecraft would head deeper into the Kuiper Belt to study one or more of the icy mini worlds in that vast region. New Horizons is scheduled for launch in January 2006 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., aboard a Lockheed Martin Atlas V. New Horizons should begin its five-month-long flyby reconnaissance of Pluto-Charon in summer 2015.

New Horizons is carrying an extensive complement of science instruments. Goddard has a major role in the Southwest Research Institute?s Ralph instrument. Ralph’s main objectives are to obtain high resolution color and surface composition maps of the surfaces of Pluto and Charon. The instrument has two separate channels: the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) and the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA). A single telescope with a 3-inch (6-centimeter) aperture collects and focuses the light used in both channels. MVIC, provided by Ball Aerospace in from Boulder Colo., operates at the visible wavelength to produce color maps. LEISA operates at infrared wavelengths. LEISA, provided by Goddard, will be used to map the distribution of frosts of methane, molecular nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and water over the surface of Pluto and the water frost distribution over the surface of Charon.

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA?s New Frontiers program of medium-class, high-priority solar system exploration projects. The spacecraft is managed by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. The Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern, is from the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX. The mission team includes Goddard Space Flight Center, APL, Ball Aerospace Corporation, the Boeing Company, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Stanford University, Calif. KinetX, Inc., Tempe, AZ, Lockheed Martin Corporation, University of Colorado at Boulder, the U.S. Department of Energy and a number of other firms, NASA centers and university partners.

For more information on the mission, visit: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Update: Pluto is not a planet